


shame without a sin

by demios



Category: Final Fantasy XIV
Genre: Non-Explicit Sex, Other, Patch 5.2: Echoes of a Fallen Star Spoilers, Yearning, espionage? kind of?, vague references to being an eldritch horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-04
Updated: 2020-05-04
Packaged: 2021-03-02 00:47:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,435
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23996257
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/demios/pseuds/demios
Summary: Igeyorhm allows her frozen heart to thaw for one terrible, terrible moment.
Relationships: Igeyorhm/Warrior of Light (Final Fantasy XIV)
Comments: 2
Kudos: 20





	shame without a sin

**Author's Note:**

> idk what this is but i wanted it out of my drafts

Emet-Selch had warned her about taking such a brazen approach.

But it’s not like something so trivial could ever stop her. Her proposal gave him pause, and for a moment she felt like a child asking the same question thrice over, beholden to the slow, thoughtful tempo of a parent’s tapping fingers on rotting wood. Yet the Architect remained patient with her, the same as when she first took a seat in the Convocation, brimming with eagerness and burdened by a sense of duty. Emet-Selch simply shrugged, any expression under his mask obscured by the mottled shade of the Twelveswood. The ever-present scent of fresh growth was overwhelming, but he, in contrast, seemed in a constant state of exhausted decay. A faint guilt gnawed at her for pressing him so insistently. Such things might not have been fitting of her place, when she had rendered the Thirteenth unusable. She considered stealing away and leaving him to his designs, until he stirred.

“To the north.” He finally offered, speaking in a tongue only the two of them could understand.

Reconnaissance during her first time on the Source had its dangers, though Emet-Selch would not further elaborate on what exactly they were. She has an inkling as to why it was difficult to navigate this reflection - the souls here are denser than those on lesser shards, misleading her when she sees shadows out of the corner of her eyes. It was no surprise Lahabrea would be unaffected, being a renowned scholar in phantomology. He walks among the dead and their remnants without flinching, possessed of the resolve she lacks. She weathers his schemes and apparent madness, discovering for herself how hardened and twisted his heart had become. A fitting conclusion when he could no longer remember himself, his soul fraying with each vessel while his desire burned bright. The mantle of villain had become a comfort - if they thought him evil for wishing to restore their broken world, he would embrace the sentiment with fervor. She finds it admirable in a way, how insatiable he is - a true martyr for their cause, the one who would bring their fallen kin home. 

Not someone like her, who couldn’t foresee the catastrophe she brought upon a shard; not someone like her, who is merely a fragment of what she was. Perhaps that’s why she pursues them with such recklessness - she is a tool of little consequence, when the memories she holds are just as splintered as the souls she’s trying to weld together.

She finds them in a moment of respite. Taking shelter from the frigid air, even though she holds the fury of a snowstorm in herself.

This vessel is nothing like she's used to, but she fashions an approximation of what her mundane corporeal form looked like in Amaurot. She keeps her claws sheathed, her fangs hidden, the boundless expanse of her million rolling eyes and endlessly echoing voice locked away. She forgoes a thorny hide and coiled horns for soft, pale skin, and a bottomless maw for delicate lips. She feels compelled to do this much, at least. Some naive hope rests with her that she will be recognized here, even if only a fraction remains.

They are strange, too. Small, with additions and subtractions to the point of being them yet not them. Her frozen heart constricts within her ribs when they turn their weary gaze upon her, looking up from the steaming drink held between their scarred hands. Two thoughts weave between each other at once. The first - an opportunity to take advantage of their weakness, when they are so desperately seeking refuge from the cold. The second - in their eyes tinted by despair, her pathetic flicker of hope is extinguished by the lack of regard they afford her.

_ Dangerous.  _ Perhaps that was why Emet-Selch warned her about her curiosity. Every fiber of her being tells her to flee now that she’s received her answer, but she has no time to mourn, and endures it.

When they ask her for a name, Igeyorhm shushes them with a kiss.

The smear of her painted lips at the corner of her mouth makes interest stir within her breast. Possessiveness, too, maybe. They are -  _ were _ \- hers, in another life. In another skin, on another set of sheets, in a city without self-righteous zealots and rains of spitfire. She holds Amaurot in her mind’s eye like a dream encased in ice. The Source feels like rising water to her - choking, murky almost-familiar souls wandering about, far from the majestic skylines and sprawling brilliance she knows. She thaws too, her restraint starting to trickle down the notches of her spine in liquid fire.

She plays the part of lover now, finding herself in Emet-Selch’s place. He had found these vain reflections wanting with every role he played, finding millenia upon millenia of wasted potential and worthlessness. In the same way, she privately decides to be adjudicator of this affair, to see for herself the shortcomings of this frail thing in her arms.

She dares not speak, untrusting of her own tongue. They seem content enough to remain mute, anyway. Where Lahabrea’s voice swirls about in a chorus of phantoms layered over each other, their voice barely embodies a modicum of what it should be. Their words are smaller, don't resonate with her core in a spectrum of emotion when they speak right into her soul, clear as crystal, echoing around her mind. They have one pitiful voice in a meaningless language, and it barely carries the distance between them before it's swallowed up by the din of the lively tavern or howling winds just outside the window.

They move strangely beneath her touch, discordant and hesitant. She bites down, tasting the diluted soul humming underneath their pulse. They cry out, a sweet and dizzying noise that serves to further incense her. The light is low enough that they cannot see each other in great detail, and it's easy for Igeyorhm to pretend here, that they're both whole, under the glassy skies of Amaurot and surrounded by the ebb and swell of ambient aether mirroring their own desire.

Copulation was never a necessity in ancient times. Engendered creatures bred for the sake of survival, but immortals had no bodily need for such an act. Children were conceived by other means, brought to life via matrices by loving parents who willingly gave their aether to a new child, crafting them a vessel that would hold a wandering soul from the lifestream. This is an unnecessary expenditure of energy, and Igeyorhm knows it. Taking pleasure in another was an act performed only by the most deeply bonded - for the most intimate thing an Ascian could do in their immortal life was know another as well as they knew themselves. 

The person Igeyorhm knew is dead. This is a wanton obscenity; she holds them in contempt for baring themselves to an enemy so easily. They were the brightest yet most pragmatic, both facets lost when they are now dim and depraved. She pins them to the bed with her borrowed form, trapping them beneath her touch like one of the writhing specimens she studied at the Akadaemia. Part of her wonders why Hydaelyn’s blessing hadn’t yet burnt her palms with damnable divinity. Perhaps Lahabrea’s grandiose schemes had borne fruit, ridding them of crystal light. Perhaps they were simply too weak to manifest Her protection. Perhaps fate had decided to yield to Igeyorhm’s folly, granting her this one indulgence without consequence.

In her excitement, her hands have become frosted with a dusting of ice, drawing forth a surprised yelp when she glosses over the inside of their scarred thighs. She grimaces slightly - the physickers of Amaurot were trained to never do an incomplete job of healing, but the menders here are far too careless, marring them long after their flesh was sewn together.

Nay - it was  _ they  _ who were careless. Foolish and feeble and incomplete, throwing themselves into danger without a thought for their fragile vessel.

They whine against her collar, shivering and curling into her as much as they can. She trails lower, spreads their knees, and rests between their trembling legs. Her hair tickles their stomach and thighs, her grip an iron vise that prevents them from escaping. Not that they would want to - she experimentally traces over the sensitive flesh at their core, already slick and tender to the touch. It throbs under her lithe fingers, delicate and warm.

They glance down at her from under messy bangs, and for a moment Igehoyrm wonders if they’re looking at her soul the same way she is looking at theirs. With nothing extraneous to distract her, she’s taken solace in the color of their soul, even if that damned Hydaelyn has tainted it the same hue. Crystal light dances behind her eyelids, tearing everything she loved from her grasp. She wants to hate it - to hate Her, to hate _ them. _

Lahabrea had done his best to restore her. She has memories of her time in Amaurot, lazily trickling back to her consciousness like a melting glacier, dripping the shock of cold water on her waiting lips.There are things she knows he knows, and his words are an illuminating flame to things she’s forgotten, searing them into her mind. And then there are things that come to her slowly, like wandering in a familiar snowfield, finding things uncovered by the relentless wind. 

_ A hand resting next to hers as she pored over her tomes. A crystal spinning in their palm, idle and glowing as its creator waited for her to finish her studies for the day. Hands brushing through her hair in the scattered light of morning, the soft press of lips to her temple. _

She wants to ask,  _ why did you not stand with us, why did you condone those who reduced our people to shards and splinters and fragments?  _ She wants to be angry and grieving and fall ungracefully into their arms - she wants to hold them tight with her whole being, like she used to, and say,  _ I missed you a thousand lifetimes over. _

Instead, she holds her silence, too enraptured by how they lay vulnerable, pathetic, and beguiling. Even now, merely a shade, she cannot stop thinking of them. Would it be a sin to raise them up here in this tender, vulgar communion? Would they accept her, and accept the truth in this moment of intimacy? A frozen stake to drive through their chest, their ribs, their thrumming heart spilling with bitter red wine, and they could be closer to whole once more. 

She could kill them right now. There is nothing but skin and unbearable want between them, she could, _ she could _ \-  _ Focus, _ she reminds herself. The towering buildings of Amaurot are faraway here. It's just her and a too-loud heartbeat that's foreign to her ears. 

The aether of the Source is at her disposal, every body and element another plaything like the days she whiled away at the Akadaemia, constructing and deconstructing anything she could acquire. In this mortal realm, she could be anything she wants. And here, she wants to be merciful.

It’s not like she knows why. Her frustration bleeds out once more - her fingers are cold again, when she brushes their neck and cheek. They cling to her instinctively, searching for warmth despite her touch being the source of their discomfort. It is an endearing sort of quality, a sickly sweet satisfaction blooming within her breast when she holds this sway over them. It would be easy to turn their flesh black and blue from the cold, yet they do not relinquish their grasp, holding her like a lover.

South, again. She strokes them as they grind into her dexterous ministrations, then uses her tongue to ghost over their swollen flesh. She teases them with the barest hint of teeth, and their soul shimmers and sings with pleasure. She knows the tempo by heart, how to make that song crescendo into a taut coil. She should be the one joining them in this familiar dance, and she takes the lead effortlessly - they are only too eager to shatter in her arms, burying their flushed face in her collar when she surfaces.

Igeyorhm substitutes her fingers for the firm smoothness of her thigh and they shamelessly rock their hips into the crux of where flesh meets flesh. Their gaze is glassy and dazed, lungs straining with the laborious rise and fall of their chest. They leave warm, sticky wetness on her pale skin, a sign of how aroused they are just from a bit of fondling.

She leans over them, dark hair brushing the indistinct shapes of their face. She is chasing after a ghost with soft, bitten lips, pressing into them with her weight, swallowing their breaths and cries and smothering them in the dark.

She wonders if they know how much she is holding back in this one-sided armistice. Would they know her name, if she asked? Not the name of this vessel, or the title she bears, but the one whispered beneath jeweled skies and the empty streets of Amaurot at night. If she took on her magus form, how many times could she wrap around them and breathe deep of their essence? Could she embrace them with sharpened claws, could she feel the warmth of their body in the briars embedded in her skin? Could she hold them with a thousand tendrils to make this moment last an eternity? To prise open flesh and bone to nestle against the comforting hue of their soul? To pick apart every membrane keeping her from it, and sink her teeth into it as if it would quell this sudden, all-consuming hunger? 

To them, she must be naught more than a monster filled to the brim with yearning. A disgusting thing, surely. But not disgusting enough to keep them from finding their release.

They climax around her, thighs twitching and hips bucking into her as they whimper and moan into the sheets. And then it is over, their release slick against her thigh now quickly cooling, their face flushed and brow damp with sweat, eyes half-lidded and lips slightly parted. They are the most beautiful and wretched thing she has ever seen.

The cold returns to Igeyorhm in time. She aches between feeling everything and nothing while listening to the calming sound of their heart, each slow breath torturous to her ears. She holds their limp form until they succumb to the abyss of sleep, then slips out through the door without looking back.


End file.
